Video transcript

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: We're
in the Tate Britain, and we're looking at John
Everett Millais' Ophelia. This is the quintessential
Victorian and quintessential Pre-Raphaelite painting. DR. BETH HARRIS: It is, and the
Victorians painted Shakespeare quite a lot. And they even painted
Ophelia quite a lot. But this is the painting
that everybody remembers. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: It's
that moment after Hamlet has murdered Ophelia's
father, and she has let herself
fall into this river and is letting herself drown. DR. BETH HARRIS: Well, she
goes mad after Hamlet murders her father and allows
herself to drown. And Shakespeare describes
the place where that happens. And he describes the
flowers and the willow tree, and Millais picks
up on that interest in the botanical setting
and expands on it. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: Well,
the botanical specificity, this is an artist who's really
taking Ruskin seriously. DR. BETH HARRIS:
Ruskin advised artists to go to nature with
singleness of heart, rejecting nothing, selecting
nothing, and scoring nothing. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
That is that nature itself has a kind
of spiritual power. And who are artists to
mess with God's work? DR. BETH HARRIS:
That's right, but that was the academic tradition
to take from nature and improve on it
and to idealize it. That was what in fact
Reynolds had advised. That's the foundation of
the academic tradition. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
And so Millais is completely rejecting that. He's going into
nature, and he's trying to be as true to what
he sees as possible. It's interesting, because when
we think of painting plein air, that is when we
think of painting outside, we often think of late 19th
century French painting. We think of the Impressionists. But of course, the
Pre-Raphaelites in England were taking this
seriously mid-century. DR. BETH HARRIS:
Millais found a spot that was very much like the
one that Shakespeare described. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: But it's not
as picturesque as it sounds. Painting outside is full of
frustrations and difficulties. You have insects. You have weather variations. You have animals. And Millais speaks about
this with a wonderful sense of sarcasm in a
letter that he wrote. DR. BETH HARRIS: Millais wrote,
"I am threatened with a notice to appear before a magistrate
for trespassing in a field and destroying the hay. I am also in danger of
being blown by the wind into the water and becoming
intimate with the feelings of Ophelia when that lady
sank to muddy death." This is the funniest
part, I think. "There are two swans
who not a little add to my misery by
persisting in watching me from the exact spot
I wish to paint. My sudden perilous evolutions
on the extreme bank to persuade them to
evacuate their position have the effect of
entirely deranging my temper, my pictures,
brushes, and palette. Certainly, the
painting of a picture under such circumstances
would be a greater punishment for a murderer than a hanging." DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: So
we have Millais really clearly at the end of his rope
trying to paint this image. DR. BETH HARRIS: Yeah. The Pre-Raphaelites often show
us images of solitary women expressing feelings of
longing, and frustration, and in this case madness. The model for this is the woman
who would become Rosetti's wife and who was his model and
muse, Elizabeth Siddal. And she apparently posed
for him in a bathtub that they kept warm
with some candles underneath, although
she did get sick, because the water did
eventually get cold. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
I know he was quite proud of the dress that he
had bought for her to wear, which was already an antique
that was embroidered heavily with silver and is
beautifully rendered here as it floats and almost
becomes like the water weeds that we see around. In fact, this painting was
really praised in its day for being perhaps the
most faithful to nature in terms of its
botanical accuracy. And we can see clearly
not only a large willow tree that has fallen
and then has regrown. And it's actually a
wonderful to look at the way that those upturned roots mimic
the pose of Ophelia's arms. DR. BETH HARRIS: And
we see lots of flowers that we can identify
very specifically. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: And
that have symbolic purpose. DR. BETH HARRIS: Right, we see
forget-me-nots and poppies, which are a symbol of
death, and violets, which are a symbol
of faithfulness. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: In fact,
she's got a chain of violets around her neck, which
I think comes directly from the Shakespearean play. DR. BETH HARRIS: So the symbolic
meaning of all of the flowers would have been understood
by the Victorian public. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
And interestingly, it links all the way back to
Shakespeare, who, as you said, is very specific
as well about some of the flowers
that are mentioned. DR. BETH HARRIS: So Ophelia
floats with her palms upturned. She's not dead yet. Her eyes are open, and she seems
to be floating down the river. But there are lovely passages
when you look closely not only at the flowers
but especially in the lower left where we see the light
moving through those reeds that are growing up in the water. The intensity of the
colors and the specificity, both of those things,
I think, would have been really new
and rather shocking to the Victorian public. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
Well, part of that was achieved because the
Pre-Raphaelites rejected the traditional
mode of painting. That is painting
on a dark ground. And so instead, they painted
on a brilliant white ground. And some of that luminosity
really comes through. In addition, some
of these artists actually painted not
on a dry white ground, but on a ground
that was still wet, which meant that that white
is picked up by the colors and really creases this
vivid luminousness. DR. BETH HARRIS: And so
the Pre-Raphaelites really were revolutionary. We love them now, and they
seem very familiar to us. But they seemed
really radical back in the late 1850s and 1850s.